I have no words for what I'm feeling right now in response to that tweet.............

This Celestalon guy is just utterly clueless when it comes to Warlocks, as it was said before. Btw did they mention what they intend to do with Shadowburn giving 2 embers back if target is killed while debuff is on it ? Since they twitted that Drain Soul was OP on add fights (really, when half of adds this expansion didn't grant embers or shards on kill...), maybe we should ready ourselves to see that go aswell.

This Celestalon guy is just utterly clueless when it comes to Warlocks, as it was said before. Btw did they mention what they intend to do with Shadowburn giving 2 embers back if target is killed while debuff is on it ? Since they twitted that Drain Soul was OP on add fights (really, when half of adds this expansion didn't grant embers or shards on kill...), maybe we should ready ourselves to see that go aswell.

Affliction's was/is far away and above what Destro gets out of it. They currently get all of their secondary resource back while we get 1/4th. I'd be pretty surprised if they remove it because at this point it's a pretty iconic part of Destro's toolkit and playstyle.

Due to my lack of complete knowledge of the intricacies of the lock specs and even the one I play, can someone clarify how demo's execute works? do you get extra fury (other than the base fury gen from casting soul fire to begin with) if you kill a target with it under 20% with SF?? If not, demo's execute is pretty lackluster in my opinion but thats for another day.

Affliction's was/is far away and above what Destro gets out of it. They currently get all of their secondary resource back while we get 1/4th. I'd be pretty surprised if they remove it because at this point it's a pretty iconic part of Destro's toolkit and playstyle.

Tooltip says you should get one Ember (instead of mana return) when you kill target. Judging how well they know our mechanics, they may say it's a bug and change it :/.

Yeah I am a little confused as to the reasoning of why blizzard felt like soul shatter, fel flame, carrion swarm, and drain soul needed to be removed. Well maybe not fel flame so much I know they stated less cast while moving, but still why not just increase its mana or lower it's damage it didn't hit that hard to begin with and wasn't really being complained about in pvp.

the other spells i listed really don't seem to have a reason behind their removal. soul shatter was very useful. how are warlocks suppose to drop aggro now? and why remove drain soul from affliction? or carrion swarm from demo? button bloat was never really an issue i heard warlocks complain about. and those abilities didn't make warlocks op so why remove them?

I'm one of the people who loved having a ton of buttons personally - main is a BM hunter. So yeah I'm not really thrilled about this spell purge either.

Button Bloat for a spec that has three spells to cast? Warlocks are the last class in the game with this absurd myth of "button bloat."

With MoP blizz attracted a lot of pokemon players with battle pets. They now feel they have to dumb down the the rest of the game to the same sort of 3 spells per character thing so the pokemon crowd can not be so terrible in the rest of the game.

Due to my lack of complete knowledge of the intricacies of the lock specs and even the one I play, can someone clarify how demo's execute works? do you get extra fury (other than the base fury gen from casting soul fire to begin with) if you kill a target with it under 20% with SF?? If not, demo's execute is pretty lackluster in my opinion but thats for another day.

If you get a KB while in demon form you get something like 200 demonic fury. Also you get molten core which lets you spam soul-fire which is both more damage and faster fury gen while the target is under 25%. (Not 20%!) Demo's execute capability doesn't feel as impactful as the other specs but it is there.

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by Nivrax

Tooltip says you should get one Ember (instead of mana return) when you kill target. Judging how well they know our mechanics, they may say it's a bug and change it :/.

They actually DID that going into 5.4 before we rallied and got them to change it back. TBH Shadowburn generation is one of the few things keeping Destro competitive. (Minus the travesty that they unleashed when they buffed our AoE significantly as a side effect of trying to make our single target not completely abysmal.

I still am hoping against hope that they don't take away fel flame, drain soul, and carrion swarm. I loved using these spells so much and not one of them caused this class to appear op. It's still early alpha and I hope they are flexible on these decisions.

The problem I have with the warlock spell removal is that it shows a high amount of dissonance between the devs and the players. All of the changes made make sense from a casual and cursory point of view, which ignores most of the deeper gameplay mechanics. We want to cut down on keybinds, cut unnecessary complicated abilities/effects, reduce ranged mobility, and reduce CCs, what do we cut from everyone?

A threat dump? Shouldn’t be necessary if we increase the tank’s threat.

Drain Soul doesn’t really seem necessary when it’s basically Malefic Grasp with execute damage, right? Just add an execute to MG and we're good to go.

Fel Flame seems kind of excessive for Warlock mobility. I mean, all three specs have something they can cast on the move, and if they really need it they can take KjC. Shouldn’t be a problem cutting that out.

They also don't seem to show any understanding of non-obvious game mechanics. My favorite change taken straight from the patch notes under the Player Health and Resilience section:

Maximum mana has been approximately doubled at all levels to keep pace with the expected health from new Stamina values.

Which doesn’t make any sort of logical sense when all spells cost a % of mana. The only ability this particular change affects is Life Tap, which converts a % of health into an equivalent amount of mana.

The changes made so far, along with Celestalon's frequent use of "I don't see a problem"-style twitter responses, don't exactly inspire confidence.

The problem I have with the warlock spell removal is that it shows a high amount of dissonance between the devs and the players. All of the changes made make sense from a casual and cursory point of view, which ignores most of the deeper gameplay mechanics. We want to cut down on keybinds, cut unnecessary complicated abilities/effects, reduce ranged mobility, and reduce CCs, what do we cut from everyone?

A threat dump? Shouldn’t be necessary if we increase the tank’s threat.

Drain Soul doesn’t really seem necessary when it’s basically Malefic Grasp with execute damage, right? Just add an execute to MG and we're good to go.

Fel Flame seems kind of excessive for Warlock mobility. I mean, all three specs have something they can cast on the move, and if they really need it they can take KjC. Shouldn’t be a problem cutting that out.

They also don't seem to show any understanding of non-obvious game mechanics. My favorite change taken straight from the patch notes under the Player Health and Resilience section:

Which doesn’t make any sort of logical sense when all spells cost a % of mana. The only ability this particular change affects is Life Tap, which converts a % of health into an equivalent amount of mana.

The changes made so far, along with Celestalon's frequent use of "I don't see a problem"-style twitter responses, don't exactly inspire confidence.

wow I agree with you so freakin' much lol, I feel the exact same way. The removal of warlocks only instant cast spell was going over the top. it didn't do huge damage, costs losts of mana so if you spam your becom oom very soon, and didn't increase our dps. that spell was more about being useful when we had to do a do a little damage on the move or just kill low level things really quick.it helped all specs so much.

and taking away drain soul was just imo stupid. It gave a spec that didn't have too many spells/abilities a somewhat deeper rotation so it didnt get monotonous. They don't understand it's one thing to have a huge complicated rotation like demo did in cata, but its another to have a rotation that's so simple it becomes boring.

then removing baseline soul shatter and demo's carrion swarm is completely unneeded.Those spells gave us great utility. I can't tell you how many times i used soul shatter to get aggro back to the tank or my pet.demo's carrion swarm was great mostly for its knockback and small amount of damage and to be honest it gave great class flavor since the only other creature that had that spell was dreadlord. since they're getting rid of felguards axe toss and putting howl of terror back on the talent tree why not just let demo keep carrion swarm. Again it didn't cause any issues and helped make the spec more fun by having a nice utility spell to knockback adds when leveling,doing old content,pvping or doing group things.

With MoP blizz attracted a lot of pokemon players with battle pets. They now feel they have to dumb down the the rest of the game to the same sort of 3 spells per character thing so the pokemon crowd can not be so terrible in the rest of the game.

The problem I have with the warlock spell removal is that it shows a high amount of dissonance between the devs and the players.

That's the feel I get often too.
I can fully appreciate wanting some specs that are very button light and simple, so the people who want that have a niche.
Unfortunately, as time goes on it seems EVERY spec is becoming that.
I remember GC said some time during Cata when mages were getting flak for their low button usage that (while mages weren't perfect), the idea wasn't terrible - variety was good, you wanted some simple specs (maybe not as simple as 1 button destro or arc mages), and some complex specs (maybe not madden druids), so everyone could find something they liked. Unfortunately that stance seems to have been dropped at some point and now you can have whatever spec / rotation you want, as long as it's simple.

I'd spent a long time content with things because I thought affliction, something that was generally thought of as a more complex spec, would be one of the ones that was left alone as a niche for the people who wanted some engaging gameplay and weren't afraid of a few buttons and timers to track.

But it seems that niche is being stripped away.

If you were new to warlocks in MOP, great - you might like this.
But it certainly doesn't seem like the people who stuck with the class over it's unpopular years in prior expansions are being catered to in the slightest.

I'm sure that's probably a more cynical take on it than the reality, but it's having the same end result. This doesn't feel like the class I spent time with and grew to love over the years and there seems to be no intent to take it back in that direction or even acknowledge a lot of complaints as holding any legitimacy , and I'm curious as to if there's any place for me in WoW's future - which is sad considering how invested I am in the game.

Yep, not optimistic about WoD either. The story is contrived, the focus is on a daily quest hub, and they're removing a lot of the tools classes have that they can test players with in raids. For the first time the emphasis looks like it's on PvP, and I can't help but feel that with only 3% of players actually participating in Arena, they're going to end up disappointing a lot of people.

Everytime I update myself on these proposed changes I cry a little more. Snapshotting gone, Drain Soul gone, most of Soulburn's functionality gone, Soulshatter gone, I'm crying inside. Please don't ruin my favourite class in this game, Warlock is the only reason I still play WoW.

Yep, not optimistic about WoD either. The story is contrived, the focus is on a daily quest hub, and they're removing a lot of the tools classes have that they can test players with in raids. For the first time the emphasis looks like it's on PvP, and I can't help but feel that with only 3% of players actually participating in Arena, they're going to end up disappointing a lot of people.

While I don't contribute a whole lot to this thread, because I find it pointless. Since it won't change anything.
I do admire your enthusiasm.
You make for good reading, keep up the good work.
We need more of your kind.